6 Ways How Shell Can Improve Its Job Search Results

In today’s post we will be analyzing Royal Dutch Shell company and its search engine results page (SERP). Since Shell is a multinational enterprise it has to maintain content for all of them. Naturally, when you are dealing with that many languages, mistakes can arise. The question is: which? Let’s see.

English keywords lead to the pages in Dutch language

First, let’s go to the Google.com and search for shell jobs. Here is what we get:

Google results

Our SERP returns page in Dutch for the English keyword:

Shell’s career page

The same situation repeats with a keywords: shell careers, jobs at shell and shell.com careers.And here are the reasons why:

Incorrect meta description

Shell’s career page

The landing page has meta description in English. Meta is used for providing short explanations of the contents of web pages. Since it doesn’t match the content language it can be confusing for search engines.

Incorrect URL

The page URL is in English too. Whereas the content of the page is in Dutch.

Shell’s career page

Google cannot detect the page’s language

To find it out we go to the technicalseo.com(it is a tool that helps to determine if the page locale-adaptive) and run our page’s URL. Here is what we get:

Shell’s career page

As you can see no language is detected.

Language is not consistent

Dutch website contains English words which can further confuse search engines.

Shell.nl

Page backlinks

Page backlinks are hosted on the US IP, which again adds up to the confusion.

Referring domains by country

What can be done to fix it?

Correct meta description

Meta description should not be written in English in order to avoid confusion about page’s language for search engines.

Correct URL

URL’s language should match the content, in our case – Dutch.

Make a use of Hreflang

We can set hreflang tag to let search engines know how pages in different languages are related.

Language the page should match the query

In case with general keywords (like Shell jobs) there should be an English version of the Dutch web page for the specific US audience.

Consistent backlinks

Make sure that the majority of the backlinks’ IPs match the language/country of the content.

Proper international website structure

Content should be put under a /nl/ language subfolder of the NL domain. Alternatively, it could be published on a .COM domain.

Expanding your brand overseas is no easy task for sure. In these matters it is always good to work with people who know how to approach international market. Here at GFluence we help various businesses with executing their international SEO strategy to its fullest potential. See the full spectrum of services that we provide for you.

Featured image source: www.cnbc.com

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